A nil-nil draw? Uruguay will take it.

Barely any atmosphere to speak of in the two downtown Montevideo spots where I caught the opening matches of World Cup 2010. Oh, there were people caped in brand-new Uruguayan flags (that they'd bought on the street en route to the cafe, no doubt) and with faces painted blue-and-white with yellow suns above one eye. But there was no singing (save the pensioners who stood for the national anthem), little reaction to the flow of play, few expressions of outrage toward the sometimes chippy French.

The one time the Uruguayans in La Papañita restaurant on Avenida 18 de Julio got boisterous was for a subtitution -- the arrival of their beloved Washington Sebastian Abreu in the second half, which brought on a massive cheer. Otherwise, not much.

They were into the game, mind you: nobody left a seat and the cafe did a booming trade. But they were, characteristically, mellow, with a show-me attitude that, I felt, bordered on fatalism. A lot of disappointment since the celeste last won something big can do that to a nation, I reckon.

But, then, in Argentina the national team stars, plastered on billboards, are taken to be bigger than life.

Here, where adults and children alike are obsessed with collecting and trading little stickers of all the players on all the teams to fill albums -- every newsvendor kiosk sells packets and individual cards, often to long lines of collectors -- the players are, somehow, smaller than that. Appreciably, in fact. And it suits the Uruguayans just fine, I think.